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XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB in CrossFire X Review

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We performing testing at 5760×1080 with 8AA and ultra settings.

The Black Edition cards are really able to power through this game at these insane settings and we are very impressed to see decent scaling at this resolution with two cards added. The real world benefits aren't that noticeable however, a single card is capable of handling this engine. The reference HD5970 board trails the pack with minimum frame rates around 35.

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23 comments

  1. good god. that is hilarious. Crysis playable at 5760×1080 at enthusiast :p

  2. lol. Not much more to say to this review. those frame rates are the highest ive seen ever.

  3. Crysis is impressive. it still runs like shit for me at 1920 🙂

  4. Well tickle my tonsels. thats a credit card bill and a half for that system. how much, 5k for the rig ?

  5. The ducati analogy is interesting. I laughed initially but you have a point and I get where you are coming from.

    Sorry at the end of the day however, I couldn’t even begin to contemplate spending almost 2k on a Crossfire setup.

  6. CPU £700, PSU £250, Memory £150, Graphics £1800, Case £250, Hard Drive £300. Cooler £100.

    Lovely. liked the videos too, that memory is wicked, is that crucial ballistix tracer ?

  7. Its £100 less than the ARES, so at least thats something.

  8. Great cards and they look beautiful, much nicer than ARES imo. Isnt AMD’s new range coming out in a few months? surely makes these pretty much redundant now.

  9. Gaming on these for a month would give a nice electricity bill. AX850 was getting warm? thats a serious output level.

  10. Melted Tech Cheese

    How many of these are XFX making? 500 ?

  11. The cost is so high probably to cover, or help cover the R&D by XFX. I can’t see them selling too many of these, id love to get sales figures, out of curiousity.

  12. i love these cards, but I couldn’t afford anything close to this. I saw a great review of this on hardware heaven too a few weeks ago.

  13. @ Robert – yeah it would heat up the house, so you might save money long term. not sure of the overall output, I just measured the cards.

    @ Brad – yes , ballistix tracer – great memory and very underrated, ive had those to 2ghz.

    @ Sam – I dont think any of us would spend 1800 on a system like this, well Id love to, but im just like you guys, a pauper 😉

    @ Joe – I haven’t read it, but I am sure it is good, Stuart is one of the best reviewers on the net.

    @ Melted Cheese Tech – I honestly have no idea of the amount of cards produced in this range, I wouldn’t say very many. ill find out if I can.

    @ Trevor – I don’t think your scenario just relates to Graphics cards, but yes a new range of cards, not long away.

  14. Ok I just called XFX, they only made 1000 of these, worldwide. quite a limited run.

  15. Very nice, apart from the noise ratings. crazy performance.

  16. … hmmm…

    If I win euro millions, I might consider setup like this… 😀

  17. the toys of the rich and famous. if only 🙂

  18. Those are really sexy looking cards – love the colours. they seem rather loud, but its part of the trade off for ultimate performance.

  19. very nice, wouldnt make me much of a better gamer however, I suck 🙂

  20. Frankie Half Life 2 lover

    I have been saving up for one of these since it was announced, almost have the money now, but it will probably all be gone by the time I get it together 🙁

  21. Very nice performance to say the least. It seems totally overkill for what most people need, but hell if you have three monitors and a core i7 970 or 980x, SSD, 1200W psu, why the hell not ? 🙂

  22. On the benchmark reviews on haven the person says that a nvidia 460 overclocked gets 30 fps average? i scored 68 fps with sli’ed 260 1 year old videocards. DX11 in this benchmark test is backwards compatible so that is with a dx 11 render… So I question the validity of that statement — “For comparison, an overclocked GTX460 scores an average of 37.1 fps. Scaling in Crossfire X is very good with the average frame rate jumping from 62.6 to 114.3 when another card is added. On a side note, we expect to see Tesselation improving with the new range of ATI cards.”

  23. With that said, my minimum fps was 10 fps higher then the minimum fps logged on those bench tests. So your buying overhead fps ;(.